Elephants

Monday

Amy Rose Everett

The elephants I’ll never forget

"No lions?” “No lions. It’s fast-flowing water, so there shouldn’t be any leeches. We do have slender-snouted crocodiles, but they’re quite shy.” “Hippos?” “One we see every now and again.” Swamp-walking hadn’t been on the year’s bingo card, but I’d found myself wading through clusters of floating dung and algae in the largest tropical rainforest on the African continent. Rubber slip-ons heavy with silt, sulfurous foam collecting in my shirt pockets, I felt strangely calm. As a day, this was turning out to be exceptional. It had been the invitation of a lifetime: to add my name to the list of a few hundred outsiders who have stamped a boot in the Congo Basin, one of the wildest and most remote places on Earth.

elephants

Thursday

Caspar Henderson

Fish that swim backwards – and other natural wonders

From our UK edition

In the Zhuangzi, a collection of tales attributed to the eponymous 4th-century BC Chinese philosopher, a frog that lives in a well boasts about its comfortable way of life to a visiting sea turtle. When the turtle describes its own existence in the vast expanse of the ocean, however, the frog has no idea what to make of it. The story is, of course, a humorous parable about typical human limitations and the possibility of stepping beyond them. But it could serve almost as well as an introduction to Ed Yong’s new book, which confirms in rich detail what Zhuangzi intuited: the nature and range of different forms of animal perception is astounding, and a greater appreciation of them has the potential to enrich human life.